Just To Feel That Love
by sketchnurse
Summary: She's going to wake up in the morning, and so is he, and they're going to look at each other, thinking a million things, wondering a million more. It won't matter.


It's not that there isn't grief, because there is grief, but there's also love, and they're both emotions, and she's emotional, compromised with the arms around her and the words she can't hear being whispered in her ears and there's still grief but—

Booth.

He's here with her, in the bed that he sleeps in, the bed in the room next right by the living room where she had been trying to sleep.

(She's not sleeping now.)

There's grief and there's love, so much love that she doesn't think she can handle it, and she's emotional, and she's not breaking with the force of it, with the force of feeling.

But she is.

But she's not broken.

But she is.

But he fixes her.

But she fixes him.

She's in a place where she never thought she'd be (always knew she'd end up.)

Had it just been a matter of time? This will always be coloured by grief, and the murders and victims and sadness and pain that had come to find them in the one place they had thought safe. But nothing has changed. Nothing.

He's loved her and she's loved him and that's the way it's been for as long as they can remember. She's been in love, like she'd never thought she'd be, and though it's all chemicals and synapses and scientific mumbo-jumbo, it's real, and those things make it real, what she feels, what she feels when she's here, and he's—

Would it matter if this had happened a week ago or a year ago or two months from now or three hours earlier? Would there have been any less _want need love passion desire?_

They're soul mates, whatever that means, whatever that _can_ mean, 'cause maybe a soul is something that lives on after a person leaves the physical plane, maybe a soul just lives inside a person's head. Maybe it's just the best way to describe what they are to each other, how irrevocable this is, how impossible it is for one of them to walk away and never think about the other again.

They aren't walking away. Not now. Not when they're here.

Weeks from now, she'll be late, and she'll take a test, and that test will give her a little blue line, and that little blue line will take her to the doctor, and the doctor will confirm the facts, and—

But that's not for weeks.

Weeks from now, they'll be doing this again, with a little more joy and a little less disbelief and a lot less desperation, but there'll be constants. Like passion and love and desire and—

She'll tell Angela about it afterwards. She'll get all the details, while we'll still be left in the dark for a little while, waiting with the rest of them, for the big news, maybe to catch a glimpse of a stolen kiss in an empty hallway or the comfortable clasp of hands, and then we'll know.

But for now—

She doesn't want to lose herself in him (not like that). This isn't so she doesn't remember, because she wants to remember, every moment and detail and second of the time she'd known Vincent; she's calmer now, and he's holding her, and it feels— it feels—

She feels—

She _feels—_

The room is dark, and she relies on her other senses, the ones that let her hear him breathing with her, in and out and in and out and in and out and in, back in, whispering words again, let her smell his cologne and his laundry detergent in his sheets and his toothpaste, let her taste tears (hers), let her feel his breath against her neck and his arms and hands and the rest of his body and the heat in the room.

She categorizes things, that's what she does. She catalogues and sorts and stores and analyses and makes sense of things. Here, with the lights out, she takes in all of the data, all of the input, and synthesizes it.

This is where she is. She's here.

And she'll be somewhere else later; so will he. So will all of them. After the grief has faded a little, when the joy of a new life invades them all and takes them by surprise, she'll be somewhere else, with him.

She'll be with him, he'll be with her.

Love? That thing she's always dismissed in her way of dismissing everything? That's what this is, what she feels now, that entirely tangible mix of this and that and agony and elation. What fills the room, fitting right in with what had filled it before.

Love? What a strange thing, in that you can write about it, document every strange occurrence, every outlandish, unexpected, out-of-place feeling, and have complete strangers know exactly what you're talking about.

Grief? She had cared about someone, she can care about people, she does care, all the time, sometimes, those few sometimes, too much, entirely too much. And then it gets her. She breaks.

He fixes her?

They're here, now, where it's finally happening, this thing that's never quite made it before, after maybe and could have happened, and not quite, almost there. After rain and steamboats and that night that they're going to have to talk about again, trying not to think of themselves as people who pushed to hard and too early and people who couldn't give. And in a few weeks, she will take that test, and that test will tell her something that will change her life.

But her life always changes.

_Life_ always changes. It has to. That's what is is.

This, though, this will never change. Not love. She's stuck with it, and is never going to go away, no matter what entropy throws at them. She hasn't managed to lose it before. And the odds are, given the track record, approximately—

She's going to wake up in the morning, and so is he, and they're going to look at each other, thinking a million things, wondering a million more.

It won't matter.

She's going to tell Angela, and Angela is going to ask for all the details, and she's going to get them, laughing and smiling and crying in that _finally _kind of a way, dear Lord _finally _that inevitable thing has happened.

Not that there was fate involved. Not that there wasn't.

Not that there's any point in speculating on things that cannot have any tangible proof either way.

They're going to argue, argue about justice and parenting and higher powers and who gets to drive and how many servings of vegetables to eat in a day and where to put the television—

The day she changes, the day she has faith in something she can't prove, will be the day he stops loving her.

It won't be easy. Nowhere, _nowhere_, had anything said it would be easy.

But there's no way they're going to leave here, this bed with two people and two hearts (metaphorical and physical) and too many thoughts and emotions and _feelings_, there's no way they're going to leave without each other.

The way she looks into his eyes, when they sit together in the diner, and she feels her own sparkle, is that love?

When they make love, just before they are one, she hears him say, right by her ear, as they breathe together, 'I love you.' and she's not sure what to say back to him, in that moment, here, where she could say a number of things, an repetition, an affirmation. She doesn't say anything. She says everything.

'Booth'

And she lets him hear the punctuation, the comma semicolon colon dash period exclamation mark, question mark. Booth, please hear _everything_.

And he does.

Always will.

So will she.


End file.
